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Show HN – Command line method for digitizing photos of whiteboards
About a month ago, after searching for an existing solution, I built a little script to take photo's of whiteboards and clean them up/make them into near perfect digital representations. Here's the script:
#!/bin/bash
convert $1 -morphology Convolve DoG:15,100,0 -negate -normalize -blur 0x1 -channel RBG -level 60%,91%,0.1 $2
Example Input:
Input 1: http://i.imgur.com/CTSIPwm.jpg
Input 2: http://i.imgur.com/37GXrwo.jpg
Example Output:
Output 1: http://i.imgur.com/Qf3jkBW.png
Output 2: http://i.imgur.com/oNueb0L.png
The basic procedure was outlined in this excellent post for cleaning up whiteboard photos using GIMP: http://matthew.mceachen.us/blog/how-to-clean-up-photos-of-whiteboards-with-gimp-403.html I just replicated the procedure using Imagemagick.
Since I do a ton of work on whiteboards nearly every day, I found this really helpful for managing photos of my whiteboard work. I figured I should share this with you guys, since the HN community seems like the kind of people who'd make use of it.
- tekknolagi 13y agoBrilliant. I really love this. So basically: `command input_whiteboard.jpg output_cleanedup.jpg` I think the only problem I can see with this is the time it takes to convert; on my MacBook Air 2012, running the command on the first input took >5 seconds.
- lelandbatey 13y agoThat invocation is precisely right. On my system, it's a shell script called `cleanWhiteboardImage`; this is an actual command I've run, taken from my bash history: cleanWhiteboardImage IMG_20140208_175541.jpg zoomedOut-action-flow-chart.png Also, yes the time it takes to make this work can be problematic. That can be mitigated by shrinking the image, though that decreases the quality of the cleanup. In reality though, I'm fine with it taking a couple seconds. My main motivation wasn't so much to make this 'fast' as it was to automate the process.
- dang 13y agoFirst, bravo! This post is made for HN. Second, posts without urls (i.e. Ask HNs) have an automatic rank penalty applied to them. Could you please put it up at an external url—even just a pastebin would do—and resubmit it? It'll have a much better chance of making the front page, where it belongs. Alert readers may notice that I have to resort to this because we don't really have any tools for making stories go up in rank. It's upvotes or nothing. Also, I've got a sweet plan to get all the good Show HNs the attention they deserve. It's a matter of finding time to implement it.
- lelandbatey 13y agoI took your advice and posted a gist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7520216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7520216 I actually made this gist a couple months ago when I first came up with this, I can't believe I'd forgotten about it.